Steak - Mark Schatzker [104]
I was beginning to have second thoughts. Maybe grass-fed steak wasn’t what it was cracked up to be. Maybe Angus Mackay’s Highland rib eye was an aberration. (That still didn’t explain the excellent Angus steak from Hardiesmill, or the steak I ate with Anibal Pordomingo up near Huinca Renancó.) The doubt registered as a pinprick at first, but it began metastasizing, and I became riddled with uncertainty. I had traveled thousands of miles to five different countries and had learned precisely nothing about steak.
Two days later, that doubt evaporated instantaneously and totally at a steak house in Buenos Aires, where I ate an incredibly good grass-fed steak with yellowy, sweet fat that melted in my mouth and had zero fade-out. I have Miguel de Achaval to thank.
During de Achaval’s withering indictment of grass-fed beef, he complained at length about its “astounding inconsistency.” Some is good, he said, and some is terrible. So I asked him how it was that my brother, who had visited Buenos Aires more than ten years earlier, had managed to eat such good steak.
It was because my brother was a tourist, de Achaval said. Tourists, he explained, know where to eat good beef. Unlike native Argentines, they go to the good steak houses that practice the art of aging beef. (This is, to my knowledge, the world’s only case of tourists knowing more than locals about where to eat well.) One of the steak houses my brother visited was called El Mirasol, believed by many to be the country’s best. I hopped back on the overnight bus to Buenos Aires and made a lunch reservation. There, I ate one of the best steaks of my life. But not before eating the best testicle of my life.
In fairness, it was the only testicle I’d ever eaten, and that makes it, technically, the worst testicle I’d ever eaten, too. It did not taste like I expected testicle to taste, but I’m not sure the pastoral language school of flavor description is up to the task of describing either the imagined or actual taste of testicle.
Sitting next to me was a steak-loving local whose blogging name is Yanqui Mike and who is known in more official circumstances as Mike Skowronek. If the name sounds less Buenos Aires than Chicago, that’s because Mike Skowronek is from there. On Valentine’s Day 2000, he was in a bar in Havana, Cuba, where he fell in love with a green-eyed Argentine. He now lives with her in Buenos Aires just a few blocks from his mother-in-law, who eats steak every day and has done so for the past eighty-six years. He helps manage the family cow-calf ranch a three-hour drive southwest. (When I asked him if the big feedlots were passing on the value of the government feed subsidy to the cow-calf farmers, he laughed.)
Chicago is world famous for its grain-fed steaks, but during his many years there Yanqui Mike was never a big steak guy. Since he moved to Argentina, steak has become one of his favorite foods. “I preferred grass-fed steak ever since the first bite,” he told me. What he remembers most of that initial steak is its flavor. It came off a T-bone so large it did not fit on the plate. When he cut into it he was stunned by the way it tasted. He kept on eating and eventually discovered that the entirety of meat had been transferred to his stomach, except for the few remaining fibers clinging to the bone, which he was picking off with his teeth.
Not long ago, Yanqui Mike’s wife unknowingly bought a feedlot steak at the supermarket. “The steak sucked, and I didn’t know why,” he told me. The texture